Agile Testers - To Be Or Not To Be Independent?

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 Recently I’ve been having discussions with various people on the ‘independence’ of a QA team/people in an organisation. Some have said there’s no way this can occur in a team using agile methodologies; others have said it’s essential to maintaining an effective and objective department devoted to improving product and process quality.

My view? It depends on the definition :-)

When it comes to asking whether a tester who is involved in a fully functioning scrum team, who is working daily with developers to define acceptance criteria (yes, I believe everyone should have a say), collaborating on test environment construction, investigating broken builds and similar complex tasks, are they 100% independent and flying the flag for the QA dept? I’d have to say no.
What they’re doing, and I believe it’s what they should be doing, is working with the team to build the best possible feature in that sprint.

If that’s the case, when is a tester working as an independent consultant for the QA cause then? Well, confusingly enough, at the same time. Whilst they’re knee deep in code and environments and repository failures, the tester needs to still keep their QA hat on and think of the bigger picture. There has to be someone in the team tasked with ensure quality assurance is being thought of and has a voice throughout the sprint.
This might take the form of reminding everyone to document their unit tests, double-check with the product owner on a specific piece of functionality and broadcast the findings, point out that code coverage has fallen for testing (be that for any type), whatever. They must remain focused on ensuring the best quality code is produced and is exactly what the product owner wants. And this requires an independent mindset to achieve it.

So the life of an agile tester is a complicated one. They have to be independent whilst not, involved up their neck in code but also standing back and observing the team’s productivity, and ensuring that there is adherence to the quality processes in place. A tough call indeed, and one that I think should merit huge salaries to compensate ;-)

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